Conventional clothes hangers typically feature a hook member which is attached to a shoulder support portion of the hanger. The hook member is typically designed for attachment to a closet support rod or the like. The shoulder support portion is designed to support a suit jacket or the like and thus includes two outwardly extending and smoothly contoured shoulder support brackets. Extending between the free ends of these brackets is a horizontal support member which is designed to support trousers or a skirt.
This type of clothes hanger is disadvantageous in that the jacket or coat covers the horizontal bar over which the trousers are positioned. Thus, the jacket or coat must first be removed in order to remove the trousers from the bar. Likewise, the jacket or coat cannot be replaced on the hanger until after the trousers have been repositioned on the bar, or else the jacket or coat must be removed before the trousers can be placed in position. This arrangement is obviously disadvantageous in that a person dressing normally puts the trousers on before the jacket or coat, and reverses the sequence when undressing.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,038,979 to Traylor is directed at the same problem associated with the above described conventional clothes hangers. In an effort to overcome this problem, the Traylot reference describes a combination clothes hanger which includes a collar portion having shoulder support portions therebelow and a pair of brackets rigidly fixed to the collar and extending horizontally outward from the collar so as to support a support bar between their free ends. While this design overcomes the problem described above with respect to conventional clothes hangers, it introduces new problems such as the introduction of a large spacing requirement which is particularly problematic in many homes and retail locations where closet or storage rack spacing is at a premium. An additional problem lies in the fact that the Traylor design removes the advantage associated with conventional hangers in providing coat to trouser frictional contact (on the same hanger and/or with regard to an adjacent hanger) which helps avoid trouser slippage in many instances and helps avoid wrinkling by facilitating a proper position of the trousers with respect to adjacently supported and contacting garments.